Common SEO flaws to avoid for SEO success
As a small business, SEO is likely one of the lowest-cost marketing strategies that you can adopt to generate leads. Don’t get us wrong- good SEO is not cheap by any means; but it may be cheaper than some other marketing methods. However, many businesses don’t get the desired results from their SEO campaigns. The reasons are usually the same mistakes that countless businesses continue to do. Avoid these mistakes to achieve success with your campaigns.
1. Don’t treat SEO to be something to be done after a website is built. Factor SEO into your website building/re-building plan right from the outset; this will save you a lot of time and effort.
2. Moving from an old site to a new site? Ensure you have carried out appropriate re-direction of pages, particularly the permanent 301-redirects for URLs that have changed permanently. Most websites that switch to a new interface suffer from the lack of proper re-direction.
3. Stop looking at SEO as a separate stand-alone activity. Instead think of “integrated marketing” and how various other activities you carry out can be used for your SEO campaign.
4. If you don’t invest in content when you do your SEO, the probability of your campaign succeeding is low.
5. SEO needs time and effort. Don’t start to think of achieving top ranking within a few days or weeks of starting your campaign. Keep expectations realistic.
6. Avoid rushing to make changes after every Google algorithm update. Don’t panic — there is a lot of unnecessary noise around algorithm updates; choose carefully the ones you need to respond to.
7. Watch your competition without being obsessed over them. Not everything that the competition does may be appropriate for your business. Trying to replicate everything your competition does could end up costing quite a lot of money!
8. Don’t try to take too many shortcuts with SEO (as what are shortcuts today often end up being considered ‘shady’ by Google at some point). That might eventually lead to penalties and irretrievable loss of position in the search results.
Hopefully, avoiding these common mistakes will get you started with SEO the right way. Are there other common mistakes that you see small businesses make? Share them!
– This article is an edited excerpt from a more detailed article written by Manoj Aravindakshan, a well-known digital marketing consultant in Singapore who founded and operates SEO agency On Target Media. Read the full article here.
